User blog:Razorgirl/My First Alliance Quest
I belong to an Alliance called the New Valyrians. It's basically an Alliance for my mates and I to enjoy playing the game together. Gods help us (Old and New) when they introduce Alliance Wars because we're more interested in bantering with each other than being in the Top Ten Alliance board - though who knows... Maybe that will change with time... Today we attempted our first Alliance Quest, Fire at the Arsenal, and this is record of some of my thoughts/experiences along the way. 'Prep Time' Selecting a time to have the Quest was difficult as we have members across Australia and the USA. It will become even more difficult to find a time that suits everyone if and when we get members from the UK. But for now, the time I was ale to find that would give everyone a chance to participate was a start time of 10am/12 noon on a Sunday for Australians, which was 8pm-10pm Saturday night for our members in the USA. We'd spent about a week collecting all the resources that we needed to be able to activate the Quest, but once that was done the hard part was finding a time that suited everyone, or failing that, gave the most people an opportunity to play. 'Activating the Quest' Only the Leader of an Alliance can activate a Quest. This seems like it's something that could cause problems for the game further on down the track... What happens if your Alliance's Leader stops playing and becomes inactive? Your Alliance is more or less screwed and you'd have to start all over again with a new Alliance. I've played other Facecrack games where that is an issue and the game becomes littered with "graveyards" (Alliances/Guilds with an inactive leader, filled with inactive players) .It's a bit demoralising for the active players to see the remains of inactive accounts. But for now that isn't a problem in the game. Activating the Quest was exactly the same as activating any other Boss Challenge. I was given the opportunity to send Ravens to my Friends to invite them to join the Quest and was given a link to give people. I guess it's expected that the Alliance Leader will share the Link in the Rookery. This seemed like a sub-optimal way of conducting an Alliance Quest. It seems that the Leader can share an Alliance with their Friends as well as members of their Alliance (it's good to be the King?). Hopefully this interface will be improved in the future. 'Fighting the Good Fight' 'Part 1 of 3' Our options in the first part of the Quest were Aid, Steal and Bribe. I assume that like all other Boss Challenges, this will rotate through all nine specialisations, so that it doesn't matter which area you Specialise in, you will get an opportunity to be awesome. The interface is exactly the same as any other Boss Challenge. As with other Boss Challenges, I was able to see the Combat Log that logged all the actions of everyone that was participating. It's disappointing that It took our group one and half hours to complete Part 1. 'Part 2 of 3: Fight the Fire' As survivors watch, troops of the New Valyrians move to stop the fire's sic spread past the docks and into the city beyond. I think I need to give the Developers a heads up about the use of apostrophes. Part Two opens up with Fight, Sabotage and Bribe, so I guess anyone with a Bribe specialisation get a second go at their specialisation. So much for my theory about everyone getting a go. Again, it took our group an hour and a half to complete Part 2. 'Part 3 of 3: Find the Arsonist' "We saw a woman lurking about on the south dock just before dawn," a shipwiright reports. "Just after that the fire started". Harass, Spy and Bribe 'Combat Log' The Combat Log needs a little tweaking. I'm sure what it's supposed to do is to show the name of everyone's Sworn Sword and what they did. Instead what I was seeing was my Ally's name in bold, followed by the name of MY Sworn Sword, not theirs. Oh well. Hopefully that won't be too hard for the Developers to fix. 'Player Chat' The Player Chat was completely unusable during the fight. Every time a new message hit the Combat Log (which would happen every .5 seconds) the screen would jump away from the Chat window to show the new activity in the Combat Log. 'Our Army' So, this Quest recommends 100 level 15 people. We had maybe 10 participating, but most of us were WAY over level 15. We decided to do this Quest as our first, since it was the one that did have a heap of loot on offer (or so we thought), and thus it seemd like the perfect practice for us before we tackled one that we actually cared about. Ironically, we started collecting the supplies when most of us were around level 15, but by the time we had all the supplies we needed we were WAY over that level. I will update this table with some stats as I'm able to get the data from my mates... 'Rewards' Everyone gots Wildfire for participating in the Quest. Join the Quest, hit once, get Wildfire. Not bad for a few seconds of effort. Some of us however were putting in the hard yards and were fighting to get one of the coveted top three ranks and thus a chance at getting. * Pyre * Flickering Fire * Black Ash At the end, I was able to make second place by 162 points (less than one swing) and won some Flickering Fire for my trouble. 'Other Observations' It would take around 3 minutes for my Sworn Sword to get a new attack. Critical Hits are the magic makers. People that were getting 600-700 per strike would over 2,500 in a single hit. Is this where the importance of % boosts come in maybe? My Action countdown timer was seriously bugged, and woul often go into negative time rather than hitting zero and giving me a new action. Sometimes if I left the Quest, opened up something else and then went back to the Quest the timer and my Actions would display just fine. Other times I would need to reload the game in my browser before it would be reset, and other times I would have to open up a new page and then refresh the browser... And then there was a time when even that didn't work. 'Conclusion' So that's an Alliance Quest. The Alliance now has +150 Power, which I believe also means +150 Power to each of the members too, but don't quote me on that. It seemed like a lot of effort for 150 Power and some Wildfire. But the banter was fun and it was difficult enough to make me feel like there was a sense of accomplishment. 1.5 hours per Stage, and almost 5 hours exactly for the whole Quest. The most most fun really came from the banter in our Alliance's Facebook Group. :"Leave it to a Stark to start a battle before we've finished feasting..." :"Leave it to a Baratheon to turn up late to a fight, and then have excuses about not being in their prime... You're drunk aren't you" :"I resunt thet implercashun" :"I'm still picking out matching outfits for my swords" :"New Baratheon motto: Ours is the Buffet!" I love my Alliance! X D Category:Blog posts